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I’ve been really struggling lately with my health and not just my physical health. Lots of reasons have brought me here, but primarily it’s been the struggles with my mental health that are the major difficulty.

Back in about July, I was able to get off the metformin for the type 2 diabetes. I was ecstatic about this. I was losing weight and feeling great.

But then it happened. I went into a pretty severe bipolar episode at the beginning of August and had to raise one of my meds and my blood glucose went wildly high since I was off the metformin. So, I decided to go back on it once again and my numbers settled back down, and now I’m getting HgA1c values about 6.4-6.5% for the last few tests.

But, I felt a bit defeated, and honestly, I was so sick with the bipolar that I couldn’t see past that enough to really be taking care of my physical health that well. My bipolar episodes typically come in the fall and spring and last for about 6-10 weeks at a time. I have a hard time functioning and just trying to accomplish basic life tasks while I’m sick. Just getting the laundry done is monumental and even things like taking a shower and brushing my teeth get hard as well. Not to mention all of the other adulting tasks that one has to do.

Mostly though, I have trouble with what I am eating and drinking when this happens. As my body and brain get manic, I crave sugar and carbs. Not the good carbs either like the starchy veggies, grains, and beans, but those sweet or salty processed carbs like chips, cookies, and chocolate. Plus, like I wrote about in a recent post, I crave soda like nothing else in the world.

I also have trouble with my meal prepping. It completely falls apart. Normally, when I’m well, I love to cook and bake and always have good food on hand. Meal prepping on Sundays makes my week go smoothly. I have all of the fresh foods made for the week just by opening up the fridge doors. All I have to do is heat something up or assemble a salad. I eat my greens, my beans, my healthy starches, and lots of fruits and veggies. My weight starts to head back down, I feel better, my blood pressure and blood glucose are lower, and I’m more likely to want to get some movement in.

But all of that falls apart when the bipolar is acting up.

I currently seem to be coming out of a mid winter/early spring episode. I’ve been sick for almost eight weeks at this point now. It’s been a very bad mixed episode, which are the worst for me. I had to increase my meds even higher than when I had to go back on the metformin.

The thing about psych meds is that they mess with your appetite and metabolism. And I’m not talking about the whiny, “but I have a slow metabolism,” it does actually alter how I process the food that comes into my body as well as the hunger cues.

When I first started my, now, emergency med back years ago on a daily basis, I literally gained 30 pounds in 30 days because not only was I always hungry, even when I wasn’t eating extra, it didn’t matter. It was as if my body created calories somehow out of thin air. And I’ve had to be back on that med for the past seven weeks. I’m trying not to eat myself out of house and home, but I gained back 11 pounds that I had fought so hard to take off. And it’s not about the weight. Well, not really. It’s about what these meds do to my blood glucose, blood pressure, and cardiac health as well. Not to mention what an increased appetite does to an eating disorder.

The meds also tend to make me tired. And this makes sense because the whole goal of the meds is to bring me back to earth from the mania, the high highs, when I can’t sleep and the thoughts are racing. But they dull the senses and slow me down.

So, back to the food. I’ve been having trouble meal prepping because I’m sleeping most days until noon or so because I just simply can’t wake up in the mornings. And when this happens on a Sunday, when I’m supposed to be cooking and baking, I have to prioritize what I have time for, and hope that it’s enough. This week, that meant one set of four meals that were actually made, when I really needed 15 meals for the week.

So I’ve been conjuring up ready made food from the pantry and freezer that I keep for times like these. Soups, canned fruits, frozen meals, a plate of greens without any other veggies and a bottled dressing, fruit smoothies. Whatever I can figure out to fill the immense hunger.

It feeds me, but does it nourish me?

One thing that I look at on a daily basis is my self-care and what have I done each day to just simply take care of myself. I know that it’s a trendy term, but it’s really important to my mental and physical wellbeing that I take care of myself in many ways.

Some of my self-care routine includes, but is not limited to: journaling, writing gratitudes, doing a meditation, writing affirmations, listening to podcasts, studying Spanish on Duolingo, reading, being creative every day, getting monthly massages, doing some form of movement every day even if it’s small, playing puzzles and word games on my phone (such as Minesweeper, Wordle, Weaver, Chrono, Connections, or math and logic puzzles), being part of a support group most mornings. So many different things that I do. Some of these I do every day, but others, not so much. But as a package, they help me take care of myself.

It’s excruciatingly difficult to take care of my physical health when my mental health is degraded.

So, what can I do more of to take care of myself? What self-care can I do to improve my mental health?

Well, things that I’d like to get back to are getting back to going to the gym and getting my meal prepping back on track. These two will help the physical issues.

But what else fills my well that I’m not actually doing enough of right now?

I want to be painting more. And not little 8”x10” canvases or rock paintings, but the big ones where I just slather on the paint with a palette knife and have fun with it. I’m working on a 36”x48” canvas right now. I had a dream awhile back in which I was shown all sorts of paintings that I had created. I remember them from my dream and I’m working on creating them.

I want to figure out how to share what I’m learning about myself in a positive way with my community as a whole. The way that I have brought self-love and compassion to my journey. This is in the works as well with and I’m already making behind the scenes progress..

I want to feel more settled in my day to day life. I want to write more and finally get some of my book ideas to become a reality.

I want my dreams, the ones that I feel got taken away from me by the bipolar and eating disorder, to see the light of day, even if that means that they take a different shape than I had imagined.

I want to have an impact on the world. I know that in my real life, with the work I do as a pediatric speech language pathologist, that I make ripples of positive impacts that will go on for years to come. When I help a child learn to say their first words or to start combining two words together, those two words become 200, become full sentences. That child communicates with others, and their words have an impact on the people that they meet, and on and on it goes. I’ve been doing speech therapy for 26 years now with hundreds of children. The true butterfly effect in action, all because I exist in the world.

So even on my hard days, when I feel like nothing is going quite right: I can’t make the perfect food choices like others, I can’t reverse the diabetes like others, I can’t make it to the gym like others, I can’t, I can’t, I can’t, I do actually make a difference in this world.

And it originates in the difference that I have made first in my own life, which can then flow out to others around me.

What do you do for self-care? What positive influence do you have towards others in your life? What is your butterfly effect?

One thing that really helps with my self-care is time with my cats. Cotton is the Calico, she’s my emotional support kitty and Princess Spitfire is the grey tabby, she’s my princess, which is about all I can say. They are both very loving and bring me joy and a reason to make it through the days sometimes. I rescued them, but they rescue me every single day.